DISPATCHES FROM THE SOCIAL MEDIA VIRUS: Elon Musk texted before Twitter deal that ‘drastic’ action was needed to tackle bots.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s text messages, made public Thursday in his legal dispute with Twitter (TWTR), show he communicated about its fake account issues both before and after agreeing to buy it for $44 billion.

The revelation that he acknowledged those issues prior to the deal could be important because Musk cited the prevalence of fake accounts on Twitter as his key reason for backing out of the agreement on July 8. Twitter, for its part, claimed his stated concern about fake accounts was a pretext for ditching the deal and sued him four days later to force him to go through with it.

Fake accounts, also known as bots, can spread misinformation and scare off advertisers, who want to sell ads to real people. Musk told a Twitter board member back in April — before he agreed to buy Twitter — that “drastic” action was necessary to tackle bots, according to the newly released text messages.

“This is hard to do as a public company, as purging fake users will make the numbers look terrible, so restructuring should be done as a private company,” he said.

“This is Jack’s opinion too,” Musk said, referring to Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey.

Why, it’s like “Twitter sentiment is a Styrofoam iceberg. You may think 9/10 of it is underwater, but actually, 9/10 of it is visible,” to coin an Insta-phrase. Somebody should write a book about this stuff.